Sunday evening and the weekend has gone again and in a few hours I will be waking up and it will be Monday morning again. In a way you have to feel sorry for for Monday mornings – a day of the week lumbered with all the misery of a trudge back to work. Almost as bad as a Tuesday afternoon half way through February.

So the weekend done what has been cooked.

Friday evening was a tray of pork ribs. There wasn’t time to marinade them. It was just a case of come home, make up the sauce, slather it over and put them in the oven for an hour forty minutes. The sauce was one of those things that worked but no attention was paid as to what went in apart from knowing there was a good squirt of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, along with the last of the soy sauce.

It went down well – the youngest daughter and I pulling at the pieces of bone with our teeth. We had them with sliced tomatoes, onions and doritos.

Saturday night was pizza night. There was a request that one should have nothing else on it but caramalised onions but for the other two I was left to myself. In the event the caramalised onions ended up with a few slices of ham on top and the rest of us had them with a smear of cooked tomatoes, onions and ham and sausage.

For all the effort put into the pizzas the highlight for those eating were the dough-balls. the small pieces of dough pushed to one side and then rolled round my fingers before going into the hot oven and then eaten with a smidgen of melted butter.

Sunday and I followed back to to the brined chicken wings I had on Thursday lunchtime. This time I was working with a whole chicken and I steeped it water that had been boiled with a mixture of sugar, salt, orange juice and pith and, most important of all, bay leaves.

Truth be told the bay didn’t come through as strongly as I had hoped but it was still pretty good.

Before the chicken we had a dozen asparagus spears with a couple of barely hard boiled duck eggs.

The duck eggs were almost the highlight of the weekend.

This time next week we will have been living in this house for 15 years. The longest I have lived in any house.

Ever since we moved in come spring a great glow of yellow flowers has burst out of tree that stands in the back of the garden. There used to be a mistletoe hedge in front of it and for years all I noticed was the bright yellow against the deep green of the tree it grew out of and I thought they were all one and the same.

Then the fence over which the mistletoe grew collapsed and so we pulled it all down to make the garden bigger and I came to realise that the yellow flowers came from a laburnum tree that was somehow managing to grow through a yew tree.

The coming of the laburnum has been a great signifier of spring but that is then coloured with summer being around the corner when the yellow will fade in a few weeks time and we will be in June and coming to the longest day after which it all slowly starts to wind back again.

But before that happens we had the first burst of yellow in the garden today.

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Some of us spent the weekend across a combination of Sussex, outside of Guildford, and then Brentwod in Essex.

That far south the seasons were two or three weeks more further advanced and as we sat in a garden on Saturday evening the high scent of some of the flowers were heady with intensity although one or two of us confused that smell with the smell of fields after feeding.

Sunday in Essex was spent in an old school hall watching children going through a further round of public speaking. The seven teams taking part were a culmination of some four hundred or schools from across the country that had started out on the competition.

Cora’s team came second which was a fantastic outcome from having watched the first round of the competition in a somewhat less grand class-room in Prenton.

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Competition done it was a slow journey back to Birkenhead and the first burst of yellow in the garden.

There is always food and good music.

I cooked for myself this evening.

By way of preparation I took three frozen chicken thighs out of the freezer last night. I had picked them up last month at The Farmer’s Market and then found I had no immediate use for them so into the freezer they went.

Lunchtime today, in an Irish rain that swept across Liverpool and came down in great gobs of wet, I walked up to Bold Street to buy onions and harissa from Matta’s.

It made me wish that I could find the opportunity to make the trip up there every week. Walking through Matta’s it is impossible to think of anything else but of all the good food that has been cooked from there in the past and will be cooked in time to come.

Home and I gave the chicken thighs 30 minutes to marinade in smoked paprika, ground cinnamon, crushed garlic, salt, lemon juice, grated onion and olive oil.

I then put a pan on a low heat and cooked up the thighs gently.

In the meantime I chopped up a preserved lemon, two thin green peppers, a good squirt of the harissa and a very good handful of coriander.

Once the thighs were cooked I stirred them into the rest of the ingredients and then tipped them on a plate with some giant couscous.

I ate it listening to the start of a party next door and the warm inner glow of the new Giant Sand album.

I can’t help feeling that the world could move on a better plain if more people were to take time out of their day to listen to a bit of Giant Sand.

I should also mention that the idea for the cooking came from the Morito Cookbook and that there is always a need for good beer – especially those made with sea-water.